Research Says /
Nonfiction Reading Promotes Student Success
Written By: Bryan Goodwin and
Kirsten Miller
The average child in
the United States spends roughly 4 hours and 29 minutes a day watching TV, 2
hours and 31 minutes listening to music, and 1 hour and 13 minutes playing
video games. And how much of their leisure time to do they spend reading
nonfiction?
Less than 4 minutes a
day.
That's the finding
from a national study sponsored by the Kaiser Family Foundation (Rideout,
Foehr, & Roberts, 2010). Sure, children are reading outside
school—about 25 minutes a day, according to the study. But most of that reading
appears to be fiction. Another study found that juvenile fiction outsells
nonfiction by more than 4 to 1 (Milliot, 2012).
Even in classrooms,
nonfiction appears to be in short supply. Duke (2000) conducted a study of 20
1st grade classrooms and found that informational texts constituted, on
average, just 9.8 percent of texts in classroom libraries. The mean number of
informational books per child was just 1.2 in low-income districts and a still
relatively paltry 3.3 in high-income districts. On average, students spent just
3.6 minutes with informational text each day. Lower-income students fared
worse, logging just 1.9 minutes of exposure to informational text (for example,
during student reading, teacher read-alouds, or writing activities) during an
average school day.
A
New Emphasis on Nonfiction
The new Common Core
language arts and literacy standards attempt to correct this imbalance by
placing more emphasis on reading nonfiction—starting with an equal emphasis on
literature and informational text in elementary school (Coleman & Pimental,
2012). At nearly all grade levels, students are expected to develop research
skills across content areas with a strong focus on nonfiction, including
literary nonfiction; essays; biographies and autobiographies; journals and
technical manuals; and charts, graphs, and maps (Gewertz, 2012).
For many schools and
districts, the Common Core standards' greater emphasis on text complexity,
reading comprehension, and nonfiction likely represents a sea change. Porter,
McMaken, Hwang, and Yang (2011) found low to moderate alignment—a range of 10
to 48 percent overlap—between states' existing language arts standards and the
Common Core standards, with an average alignment of only 30 percent.
In light of this new
emphasis, we should ask what the research says about the benefits of reading
nonfiction. Is it really worth tearing kids away from The Hunger Games,
the Harry Potter books, or Diary of a Wimpy Kid? After all, with
multimedia consuming so much of students' time, shouldn't we be happy they're
reading at all?
What
Students Read Matters
For years, we've
known that the amount of independent reading students do contributes to their
reading skills. Students who read more tend to learn more vocabulary, become
more proficient readers, find reading more enjoyable, and thus continue to read
more and become ever better readers (Stanovich, 1986). Poor readers, on the
other hand, tend to read less and lose ground. Over time, these differences
create a widening gulf in learning. Students at the 90th percentile of reading
volume (reading 21.1 minutes a day) encounter 1.8 million words a year, while
students in the 10th percentile (reading less than one minute per day) read
only 8,000 words a year (Cunningham & Stanovich, 2001).
Only in the past
decade, however, have researchers begun to uncover that it's not just how
much students read that matters, but also what they read. In
particular, students need to read and comprehend informational texts as
often—and as fluently—as they do narrative texts.
Traditional basal
texts—which consist of largely narrative content—have come under increasing
scrutiny. A comparison of an enrichment reading program and basal reading
programs (Reis, Eckert, McCoach, Jacobs, & Coyne, 2008) found that the
enrichment reading group scored significantly higher in oral reading fluency
than did the basal reading group. Students in the enrichment reading group
received instruction on thinking skills during teacher read-alouds;
independently read self-selected books; participated in individualized reading
conferences; and engaged in a variety of enrichment activities of their choice,
including book discussion groups, creative writing, and other interest-based
projects. The researchers concluded that providing "structured silent
reading of self-selected challenging books, accompanied by supported,
individualized reading instruction … may be a promising way to increase reading
fluency" (p. 312).
In the Common Core
State Standards, the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices
and the Council of Chief State School Officers (2010) cite a compelling
research base supporting the shift to more complex, nonfiction texts. They note,
for example, that students who are able to answer questions related to complex
text have a high probability of earning a C or better in an
introductory-level college course in U.S. history or psychology.
One reason reading
nonfiction may be so important is that it helps students develop their
background knowledge, which itself accounts for as much as 33 percent of the
variance in student achievement (Marzano, 2000). Background knowledge becomes
more crucial in the later elementary grades, as students begin to read more
content-specific textbooks (Young, Moss, & Cornwell, 2007) that often
include headings, graphs, charts, and other text elements not often found in
the narrative fiction they encountered in the lower grades (Sanacore &
Palumbo, 2009).
How
Teaching Needs to Change
In response to the
new standards, many teachers may need to shift how they approach both reading
and writing. For example,
Book reports will ask students to
analyze, not summarize. Presentations will be graded partly on how persuasively
students express their ideas. History papers will require reading from multiple
sources; the goal is to get students to see how beliefs and biases can
influence the way different people describe the same events. (Santos, 2011)
One English teacher
who taught a unit on the influence of media on teenagers said that she had
previously had her students cite just one source for their papers; this year,
she had them read multiple sources, including surveys, newspaper columns, and a
4,200-word magazine article by Nicholas Carr titled "Is Google Making Us
Stupid?" (Santos, 2011).
Teachers may find
that this shift pays off in terms of student enthusiasm. Researchers have noted
one other benefit of nonfiction reading: the potential to motivate young
children to read by tapping into their interests (Caswell & Duke, 1998).
This may, in fact, be the most important insight to be gleaned from research.
Although students may continue to find fiction appealing, nonfiction doesn't
have to be boring. On the contrary, allowing students to explore and pursue
their interests within a broad array of informational texts can help them to
see that the real world can often be just as surprising and intriguing as
make-believe.
References:
Education Leadership
December 2012/January 2013 | Volume 70
| Number 4
Common Core: Now What? Pages 80-82
